The present invention generally relates to cellular phone call. More particularly the invention aims at managing calls using the prefixed call numbers as supported by most of the cellular phone networks.
There is an increasing need to provide an appropriate billing and accounting of the usage of corporate resources like cellular phones owned by a company and used by its employees. For instance, appropriate chargeback of a company cellular phone may be needed to distinguish between personal usage and business usage. In the case where the distinction between business and personal calls is automatically performed, the employee, during a weekend or in the evening, is free to spend the appropriate amount of time he needs in personal calls. The employee knows that proper accounting will occur, and that he will not have to justify such personal usage of the cell phone to his company, as he is paying for that usage.
An even deeper analysis is required today by the companies. For instance, within the scope of a business usage, a company may also be able to chargeback the specific costs to the different accounts or engagements that his employees are working for.
The U.S. Pat. No. 6,925,160 discloses a central system for receiving billing information of the employee cellular phones from the phone service providers, the central system comprising a rule engine to analyze the information received for particularly distinguishing between usage of the phone for business and personal activities. The billing engine analyzes the billing information sent by the phone service providers and uses employee personal and business inputs information stored in the company databases accessed by the employees. By knowing, for instance, the employee vacation days, calendar entries and a Phone Book with personal and professional phone numbers, the centralized billing application is able to distinguish between personal and business use and also to distinguish between different business activities for a same employee.
Considering the solution of the prior art, it is required to have a more flexible and dynamic way to prepare information of the employee in relation with the phone calls. Even if, at the level of a company, there is always a centralized system to prepare billing of employee phone calls according to the call types, however, the employee information is tedious to be collected particularly because it can change quickly and the usual company databases are not always immediately updated. Also the well known congestion at remote server side bought by a centralized application and system should be avoided especially when the company does invest too much in this domain.
To avoid a Call management centralized solution, most of cellular phone networks today support the calling feature which consists of asking the caller to dial a special code prior to a telephone number so that a special telephone service is started. Particularly, the cell phone user can prefix his/her call with a specific numeric prefix (e.g. 46, for Telecom Italia telecom provider) to distinguish business calls from personal calls. So, for instance, if the employee calls the extension 06.12345678 which has been entered as in his phone number directory, that call will be accounted as a business call, while if the same extension is dialed as 46.06.12345678 that same call is marked as a personal call on the bill sent by the telephone operator to the employee company. When the company receives billing from the telephone operator, it can directly dispatch personal call billing to the employee. There are however limitations to the above approach and service, when offered from a specific phone operator:
Such “personal call” prefix may be different from one operator to another (46 for Telecom Italia, and 9 for Vodafone). This obliges a complete migration of personal telephone numbers, stored in the telephone or sim-card memory, when a company changes his telecom provider.
This “personal call prefixing”, usually does not work in roaming situations, especially when the cell-phone is used abroad. So for instance when an Italian user is traveling in the US, or in France, and he wants to make the personal call specified in the example above, he has to dial +39.06.12345678. He cannot dial 46.<national_ext> as the 46 prefix is simply not recognized abroad.
As “personal call prefixing” does not work in roaming situations, users are usually obliged to store double telephone numbers for most dialed personal extensions: one “prefixed” (e.g. 46) to be used within the home country, so that automatic accounting occurs, and one with the international prefix (+39) that will work from abroad, even if that will be handled as a business call. This can be both a boring practice, and a misusage of the limited amount of memory that cell-phone or subscriber identification module (SIM) card offers.
Because of the last point, i.e. that operators do not allow to flag abroad calls as personal, the user will then have to periodically connect to the company billing system, to specify that the 10 calls he made from the US to the number +39.06.12345678, have to be charged as personal calls. This practice may be quite boring as well, but failure to do so may cause improper accounting, incorrect benefits taxation, incorrect reporting of financial results, etc.
Finally the “personal call prefixing” implemented by the operators, when working, is limited to a black&white approach, unable to support more complex chargeback scenarios, like business related calls, to be charged to different accounts or service engagements.
Consequently, it is desirable to distinguish billing of employee cell phone calls between business and personal calls while avoiding the drawbacks of the prior art centralized solution and of the current personal call prefixing service currently implemented by the cell phone operators.